Page 9 of Runaway Hucow

The bisonman nodded toward the trees. “You have any other belongings, ma’am?”

Tess suddenly remembered the cattle prod. Did she even want to tell the bisonman about that? If she didn’t tell him, and he found it anyway, that would probably be bad. This creature was death incarnate, and Tess didn’t want to piss off death incarnate. She turned and silently pointed to where the weapon was leaning against the trunk of one of the aspens.

The bisonman rose with a grunt and moved off into the thicket of trees. Tess watched him go, unable to take her eyes off him. He found the cattle prod and held the device up to inspect it in the morning light filtering in through the leaves. He pulled the trigger, and a blue thread of electricity crackled between the prongs. He grunted and stuffed the weapon into some inner pocket hidden within his cloak.

Then he came back to where Tess was sitting, still half frozen in fear and wonder.

“It’s not safe here,” he said. “We need to move.”

Tess wasn’t about to argue. Not with death incarnate. She started to stand, but before she was all the way up, she felt herself being lifted off the ground, and the next thing she knew, she was draped over one gigantic furry shoulder. As the bisonman carried her off into the tall grass of the prairie, his words echoed through her mind…

The hucow is mine.

CHAPTER 6

Once he had picked the little hucow up, he thought he would never want to put her back down again. Her tiny body felt as light as a feather on his shoulder, and as soft as a cloud. He loved the way her supple curves yielded to his harder muscles. But what he loved even more was the way she smelled. It was obvious she’d not been allowed to bathe in a long, long time, but he didn’t mind that. Not one bit. The sweet and savory aroma of her body’s natural scent filled his lungs and stiffened his cock until it felt about as hard as the barrels of the shotgun he was carrying in his other hand. As a bisonman, he was not a meat eater, but he would gladly make an exception for his little hucow, he thought with a faint smile.

He would have liked to carry her all the way back to his cottage like that, with her plump little backside bent over his shoulder and her sex filling his nose with the scent of her feminine arousal.

But that would be impractical.

He wouldn’t have been able to make it two miles without throwing her down on the grass and breeding her into submission beneath the open sky.

And he didn’t want to do that to her.

Not yet.

She was afraid of him. He could tell by the way her body was shivering on his shoulder, even though the sun was already up and the morning was already warming. She was probably still rattled by what the three bounty hunters had tried to do to her. His blood fired with rage when he thought about that.

But the men had been dealt with. There was no point thinking about them anymore. Now his job was to show the little hucow he was different from those men, not only in his appearance, but in his heart. He would not breed her before she was ready, no matter how badly he wanted to do so.

Besides, there was still one other matter that needed to be taken care of first.

With the little hucow slung over his shoulder, he waded out into the tall grass. It was the place where he felt most at home. At first glance, the prairie appeared to be a flat ocean of vegetation, but there were trenches and shoals hidden beneath that green surface. One just had to know where to look.

He heard the horses well before he saw them, and he smelled them even before that. Less than a quarter of a mile out, the land sloped slightly upward, then dropped sharply into a deep gully between two small hills. The three animals were down there munching grass. One buckskin, one sorrel, and one chestnut mare with a white blaze down her snout. He was glad the shooting hadn’t caused them to bolt.

He felt responsible for the horses. He’d killed their riders, after all.

Killing the three bounty hunters had been an easy thing, and disposing of their bodies was not a concern. Already, half a dozen harpies were circling the sky over the place where their bodies lay, and soon they would descend and feast on the dead. When those winged women were finished, there would be nothing left of the bounty hunters but bones and rags. Should someone happen upon their remains, they would only know that men had died there, but not who or why.

The horses were a different matter. They were innocent. They had no way of knowing the riders they had served were bad men. He could have untacked them and turned them loose on the open prairie, but that notion didn’t sit well with him. These were domesticated animals, unused to wild living, and there were predators stalking these grasslands—wolves, bears, rattle-tailed snakemen who could swallow a horse whole.

No, he was going to have to take the animals with them. His older brother Roscoe wasn’t going to be happy about that, but he was going to be even less happy about the hucow. Oh well, the grumpy old so-and-so was just going to have to deal with it.

He would see the right of it eventually.

On the upside, the horses would allow him to get the little hucow off his shoulder, which was something he needed to do immediately. Her scent was making him drunk with lust, and his poor aching cock was fit to burst right out of his britches. If he had to carry the little female for one more minute, he didn’t think he would be able to control himself. He would throw her down and rut her into oblivion, once face-to-face and once from behind, the way buffalos did it. The third time, he would put it in her mouth, just so he could see the look in her eyes when he spent himself all over her tongue.

But he wasn’t supposed to be thinking such things. Not yet.

“Do you know how to ride?” he asked.

“Y-yes,” a tiny voice answered from behind his head.

He was surprised by that. It was uncommon for a hucow to know how to ride, or how to do much of anything besides eat and be milked. That wasn’t their fault, of course. That was just how the humans raised them.

But this hucow was different.